Who Rules the World?

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Chomsky is a global phenomenon. . . . He may be the most widely read American voice on foreign policy on the planet." —The New York Times Book Review With relentless logic, Chomsky bids us to listen closely to what our leaders tell us—and to discern what they are leaving out. . . . Agree with him or not, we lose out by not listening." —BusinessWeek i] Amy Goodman and Noam Chomsky, “Chomsky: Occupy Wall Street ‘Has Created Something That Didn’t Really Exist” in U.S.—Solidarity’”, Democracy Now! May 14, 2012 https://www.democracynow.org/2012/5/14/chomsky_occupy_wall_street_has_created, accessed July 14, 2019.

Fierce, unsparing, and meticulously documented, Who Rules the World? delivers the indispensable understanding of the central issues of our time that we have come to expect from Chomsky. The GWOT was declared by the Reagan administration when it took office, with fevered rhetoric about a “plague spread by depraved opponents of civilization itself” (as Reagan put it) and a “return to barbarism in the modern age” (the words of George Shultz, his secretary of state). But again who rules “the world”? Is it ruled by the people? The normal Americans who go to vote every four years? Nope. Actually, in the 2016 election, about 94 million eligible US voters avoided the election because they believed their vote won’t make a difference. No matter who the president is, the policies especially the foreign policy of the US will not change because it is controlled by “Masters of Mankind” as the author calls them. And these are the big corporations and financial institutions. They are the principal architects of government policy and who pursue their “vile maxim”: “All for ourselves and nothing for other people”. They represent what they term “the national interest”. A term that is used again and again to represent their interests and not the people, just like how “the world” does not represents the actual world.Chomsky continues to hope that demands for “independence, self-respect, and personal dignity” may reappear “when awakened by circumstances and militant activism,” but he doesn’t appear to be holding his breath.

The assault was awful enough. The victims have yet to recover. But what happened to South Vietnam and later all of Indochina, where “the second superpower” imposed its impediments only much later in the conflict, was incomparably worse. US has been at the peak of power after World War II but since 1970's, the US share of global wealth have fallen by 25% and industrial world have become tripolar: North America, Europe and East Asia. Though US still remains the most powerful state in the world, global power is continuing to diversify hence US is increasingly unable to impose its will. Noam Chomsky takes issue with my criticism of his one-dimensional focus on what he sees as America’s nefarious role in the world. If Chomsky had entitled his book “America’s Evil History,” I would have accepted his exclusive focus. However, he entitled it “Who Rules the World?” yet goes on to write as if the United States is virtually alone as the cause of all the world’s problems. North Korea may be the craziest country in the world. It’s certainly a good competitor for that title. But it does make sense to try to figure out what’s in the minds of people when they’re acting in crazy ways. Why would they behave the way they do? Just imagine ourselves in their situation. Imagine what it meant in the Korean War years of the early 1950s for your country to be totally leveled, everything destroyed by a huge superpower, which furthermore was gloating about what it was doing. Imagine the imprint that would leave behind. The rising opposition to the neoliberal assault highlights another crucial aspect of the standard convention: it sets aside the public, which often fails to accept the approved role of “spectators” (rather than “participants”) assigned to it in liberal democratic theory. Such disobedience has always been of concern to the dominant classes. Just keeping to American history, George Washington regarded the common people who formed the militias that he was to command as “an exceedingly dirty and nasty people [evincing] an unaccountable kind of stupidity in the lower class of these people”.As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves and motives favorably to understand the logic behind them, nor to grasp the importance of understanding that logic instead of issuing imprecations against it. As in the case of China, a great deal is at stake, reaching as far – literally – as questions of survival. The challenges today: the Islamic world In 2015, China also established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), with itself as the main shareholder. Fifty-six nations participated in the opening in Beijing in June, including US allies Australia, Britain and others which joined in defiance of Washington’s wishes. The US and Japan were absent.

I don't agree with [this] assumption. The major journals are, I think, an indispensable source of information. They do of course reflect particularly perspectives, but careful reading and when relevant investigation of other sources can compensate for that. This is particularly crucial in three regions: east Asia, where “the US navy has become used to treating the Pacific as an ‘American lake’”; Europe, where Nato – meaning the United States, which “accounts for a staggering three-quarters of Nato’s military spending” – “guarantees the territorial integrity of its member states”; and the Middle East, where giant US naval and air bases “exist to reassure friends and to intimidate rivals”. The US-UK invasion, utterly without credible pretext, is the major crime of the 21st century. The invasion led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a country where the civilian society had already been devastated by American and British sanctions that were regarded as “genocidal” by the two distinguished international diplomats who administered them, and resigned in protest for this reason. The invasion also generated millions of refugees, largely destroyed the country, and instigated a sectarian conflict that is now tearing apart Iraq and the entire region. It is an astonishing fact about our intellectual and moral culture that in informed and enlightened circles it can be called, blandly, “the liberation of Iraq”. A common feature of successful insurgencies, Polk records, is that once popular support dissolves after victory, the leadership suppresses the “dirty and nasty people” who actually won the war with guerrilla tactics and terror, for fear that they might challenge class privilege. The elites’ contempt for “the lower class of these people” has taken various forms throughout the years. Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

With the “Orange Revolution” victory of pro-western candidates in Ukraine in 2004, State Department representative Daniel Fried rushed there and “emphasized US support for Ukraine’s Nato and Euro-Atlantic aspirations”, as a WikiLeaks report revealed. As in the case of China, one does not have to regard Putin’s moves favorably to understand the logic behind them As for Chomsky’s claim that Jessica Mathews was embracing instead of criticizing the view that the US government advances “universal principles” rather than “national interests,” I simply refer the reader to the tenth paragraph of her review in the March 19, 2015 issue of The New York Review (available online), where to most other than Chomsky her meaning is obvious in the midst of a critique of unilateralism as opposed to the multilateralism that she prefers. Chomsky seems to find her next sentence to favor his interpretation—“At its extreme, this reasoning holds that the US should not be bound by international rules”—when in fact she is providing an added reason to reject the misguided unilateralists. urn:lcp:whorulesworld0000chom:epub:9f70e70f-7d1c-4922-b94f-01af49f5fa53 Foldoutcount 0 Identifier whorulesworld0000chom Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t81m2493d Invoice 1652 Isbn 9781627793810 The west sees Nato enlargement as benign. Not surprisingly, Russia, along with much of the Global South, has a different opinion, as do some prominent western voices. George Kennan warned early on that Nato enlargement is a “tragic mistake”, and he was joined by senior American statesmen in an open letter to the White House describing it as a “policy error of historic proportions”.